July 29, 2004

EDITORIAL

Winners and losers

Here are some of the ways children who go to the Antioch School use the land on their southern border:

They walk hand in hand through the tall grass. They study black-eyed Susans as they sprout, grow, blossom and die through the seasons. They watch butterflies. They roll down the hill. In the woods, which they call the Enchanted Forest, the children explore and sometimes they hide. Each Halloween in the Enchanted Forest they create costumes and present original skits to their parents and friends.

In the winter, the children learn biology by tracking animals. They sled down the hill. They throw snowballs.

Behind the Antioch School stretches the Antioch College Commons, and that mowed lawn works fine for playing soccer or dodgeball. But the eight acres on the school’s southern edge is something special, a place of woods and meadow, a laboratory for learning about the natural world. It is also a wild space, the sort of place that grabs a child’s imagination and just won’t let go.

And beyond its value as a natural space, the land serves a deeper purpose, say some teachers at the Antioch School, a school where children learn to take responsibility for themselves and for their own learning. The fenceless expanse of fields and woods provides a daily opportunity for growing up, for children to promise to go only so far and then to do so, learning to trust themselves and to be trusted.

Recently the Board of Trustees of Antioch University, which owns those eight acres, announced its intention to sell the land. Antioch College needs money and administrators say they plan to sell to the highest bidders, who will probably be developers. The developers will likely pay several hundred thousand dollars for the land, on which they could build 10 large homes.

The Antioch School community wants nothing more than to purchase the land, to keep it forever green for the children and for the community. But it’s a small school, a struggling school (and a wonderful school) that has nowhere near that kind of money.

It’s all so complex. There are no good guys or bad guys. The college needs money. People want to live in Yellow Springs and there aren’t enough houses. If the college sells the land, it gets money, people get homes, and Yellow Springs gets new taxpayers. You could call it a win-win-win situation.

But wait. There are big losers here. The children of the Antioch School look like the losers. And, for that matter, so do all of the children of Yellow Springs, and the adults too, who will lose one of their wild, sacred spaces. What price can we put on that loss?

We need to ask what we value as a community. Do we value the needs of our children? Do we value our sacred, wild spaces? We need to let Village Council, which will be asked to rezone the land, know which values we hold dear. And surely Antioch University needs to ponder its values, and ask whether a short-term infusion of cash trumps long-term stewardship of the land and responsibility to the larger community.

Historically, Yellow Springers have valued innovation and found creative solutions to complex problems. Surely, a solution within our grasp can make us all winners.

—Diane Chiddister